President Trump on Saturday criticized Puerto Rico’s “poor leadership” and defended his administration’s response to the aftermath of Hurricane Maria’s devastation on the island in an early morning series of tweets that earned immediate backlash from Democrats and other critics.
Following a plea for aid on Friday by San Juan’s mayor, Trump said the mayor was being “nasty.”
“The mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump,” Trump tweeted. “Such poor leadership ability by the mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help.”
“They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort,” he continued. “10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.”
Donald Trump marked Tuesday with another campaign-style rally in Ohio, using his platform to grab praise from his supporters and return to the glory of his campaign. There were plenty of pro-Trump folks in attendance, with some anti-Trump protestors tossed into the mix, giving the entire event a nostalgic 2016 feel that’s bolstered by Trump once again taking aim at illegal immigrants.
One by one, we are finding the illegal gang members, drug dealers, thieves, robbers, criminals, and killers. And we are sending them the hell back home where they came from. [applause]
And once they are gone, we will never let them back in, believe me. [applause]
The predators and criminal aliens who poison our communities with drugs and prey on innocent young people — these beautiful, beautiful, innocent young people — will find no safe haven anywhere in our country. [applause]
And you’ve seen the stories about some of these animals. They don’t want to use guns, because it’s too fast and it’s not painful enough. So they’ll take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15, and others, and they slice them and dice them with a knife, because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they die. And these are the animals that we’ve been protecting for so long. Well, they’re not being protected any longer, folks.
There’s nobody to question this comments at the rally, sites like Shareblue point out that Trump’s rant was less about actually dealing with violent criminals and more about “building up the anger and suspicion” with his supporters. He’s campaigning six months into his presidency and shows no signs of stopping. He’s even gone back to saying he’s more presidential than any president before — setting aside an exception for Lincoln.
“We mean criminal organizations that turn cities and suburbs into warzones, that rape and kill innocent citizens and who profit by smuggling poison and other human beings across our borders,” the speech says. “Depravity and violence are their calling cards, including brutal machete attacks and beheadings. It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first take our stand against this filth.”
But according to Catherine Thompson of Talking Points Memo, Sessions dropped “against this filth” while delivering the speech to border agents in Nogales, Arizona.
In the past, Sessions, like Trump, has enthusiastically expressed discontentwith immigrants and vowed to deport thousands of undocumented immigrants who he’s repeatedly painted as hostile and violent.
As an Alabama Senator, Sessions opposed immigration reform by arguing that immigration “takes jobs from Americans and can, in fact, create cultural problems.” He was one of the most vocal Trump supporters during the 2016 presidential campaign, and supported him after he described Mexicans as bad hombres, rapists, and criminals. And during his first speech as the U.S. Attorney General in February, Sessions said, “We need to end this lawlessness that threatens Americans’ safety and pulls down wages of ordinary Americans.”
Based on the glaring omission on Tuesday, it appears as though Sessions thought the term “filth” would’ve been a step too far.
Donald Trump’s attorney general said Tuesday the Justice Department will limit its use of a tactic employed aggressively under President Obama — suing police departments for violating the civil rights of minorities.
“We need, so far as we can, to help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness. And I’m afraid we’ve done some of that,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“So we’re going to try to pull back on this,” he told a meeting of the nation’s state attorneys general in Washington.
Sessions said such a move would not be “wrong or insensitive to civil rights or human rights.” Instead, he said people in poor and minority communities must feel free from the threat of violent crime, which will require more effective policing with help from the federal government.
While crime rates are half of what they were a few decades ago, recent increases in violent crimes do not appear to be “an aberration, a one-time blip. I’m afraid it represents the beginning of a trend.”
Sessions said he will encourage federal prosecutors to bring charges when crimes are committed using guns. Referring local drug violations that involve the use of a firearm, for example, to federal court can result is often a stiffer sentence than would be imposed by state courts.
“We need to return to the ideas that got us here, the ideas that reduce crime and stay on it. Maybe we got a bit overconfident when we’ve seen the crime rate decline so steadily for so long,” he said.
Under the Obama Administration, the Justice Department opened 25 investigations into police departments and sheriff’s offices and was enforcing 19 agreements at the end of 2016, resolving civil rights lawsuits filed against police departments in Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore, New Orleans, Cleveland and 15 other cities.
On Monday, Sessions said he is reviewing the Justice Department’s current policy toward enforcing federal law that prohibits possession of marijuana, but has made no decision about whether to get tougher.
His opposition to legalization is well known, and he emphasized it during an informal gathering of reporters . “I don’t think America will be a better place when more people, especially young people, smoke pot.”
States, he said, can pass their own laws on possession as they choose, “but it remains a violation of federal law.”
The current policy, spelled out in a 2013 memo from former deputy attorney general James Cole, said federal prosecutions would focus on distribution to minors, involvement of gangs or organized crime, sales beyond a state border, and growing marijuana plants on federal land.
Donald Trump has stood by his decades-old claim that the group of five men blamed for a 1989 rape and beating in Central Park before being exonerated were actually guilty.
In a statement to CNN as part of a retrospective on the case, the Republican presidential nominee maintained, despite DNA and other evidence to the contrary, that the men were guilty of raping and beating an investment banker who had been jogging in Central Park at night.
“They admitted they were guilty,” Trump said. “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.”
The five men, who became known as the Central Park Five, were exonerated in 2002 when an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney found DNA evidence linking the vicious crime to a previously convicted rapist. That man admitted to acting alone in the crime.
New York City settled with the five men in 2014, agreeing to pay them a collective $40 million for time spent wrongfully convicted and imprisoned. The hasty conviction of the men, who were ages 14 to 16 at the time, was widely viewed as a symptom of racial biases and the pressure prosecutors and law enforcement felt to find culprits amid fear of crime in the city amid a spiraling crime rate.
Trump, then as now a prominent Manhattan real-estate figure, took out a full-page ad in The New York Times shortly after the jogger was attacked calling for New York to revive the death penalty.
“I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” Trump wrote. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”
Trump also previously complained in an op-ed article in the New York Daily News that the settlement between the five men and New York was a “disgrace,” saying the “recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city” to settle for an amount as high as $40 million.
Trump’s campaign has previously defended his demonization of the wrongfully convicted men.
Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, an adviser to Trump’s campaign, touted the ad earlier this year during an interview with an Alabama radio station, saying that it showed Trump was committed to law and order.
“Trump has always been this way,” Sessions said. “People say he wasn’t a conservative, but he bought an ad 20 years ago in The New York Times calling for the death penalty. How many people in New York, that liberal bastion, were willing to do something like that?”
Video footage from a legal deposition of Donald Trump released Friday suggests the Republican presidential candidate planned to call Mexicans “rapists” when he first announced his candidacy.
The offensive remarks were premeditated, Trump suggested under oath in a sworn video deposition taken June 16.
The deposition was part of a lawsuit Trump launched against a restaurateur who pulled out of a deal to open a restaurant in the billionaire businessman’s new Washington, D.C. hotel in response to his racism.
The deal fell apart after Trump made his offensive comments on the campaign trail.
It is one of two lawsuits Trump leveled against restaurants who said his nasty remarks were reason enough to end their business relationship.
“They thought I made statements that were inflammatory in some form,” Trump said, complaining of the response he’d received for his incendiary remarks.
Asked if he had planned “in advance” what he was going to say in that now-famous speech launching his campaign, he said “yes.”
“I mean, I’ve tapped into something. I’ve tapped into illegal immigration,” he said a minute later, bragging about his big primary win.
Trump’s team fought the video becoming public, but a judge ruled Friday that the candidate’s argument that it could be used in attack ads against him wasn’t enough reason to keep it sealed.
The GOP candidate said that he did “virtually nothing” to prepare for the sworn deposition, similar today his approach heading into the first presidential debate.
Donald Trump’s new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, on Sunday said that the creation of a “deportation force” for undocumented immigrants under a Trump administration was “to be determined.”
Throughout the Republican primary, Trump supported the forcible removal of the some 11 million undocumented immigrants estimated to live in the United States.
Last November, he called for a deportation force to do the job. In an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” he said, “You’re going to have a deportation force, and you’re going to do it humanely.”
Trump has made the vilification of immigrants a central part of his campaign: from his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border (and claims that Mexico will “pay for it”) to his call to ban people who are Muslim from traveling to the United States. He made headlines in June for saying that an American-born judge presiding over a Trump University lawsuit could not be impartial because of the judge’s Hispanic ancestry.
But in August, his campaign convened a meeting of a new Hispanic advisory board. Speaking to NBC Latino of an “open-minded” Trump, Hispanic supporters who attended the meeting suggested the GOP candidate would unveil a new immigration plan that offered solutions beyond deportation.
In light of the meeting and apparent policy reversal, CNN’s Dana Bash pressed Conway, who was named Trump’s campaign manager just days ago, Sunday on whether Trump still supported launching the deportation force he called for during the primary.
While Conway’s answer does not completely discount a deportation force, it does put it in to question, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
With the many other flip-flops since becoming the Republican party’s nominee, he’s rejected virtually every stance that his supporters loved which separated him from the other candidates during the primaries. How could Trump be taken at his word for anything anymore?
As we explained in our policy review of Trump’s immigration reform, mass deportations would involve rounding up every undocumented person and forcibly removing them from the country. What Trump is advocating here, the forced removal of a portion of a population with the same national heritage from an area, already has a name, it’s called “ethnic cleansing” and it is not seen as a positive and moral thing. On top of the horrific crimes against humanity being proposed, what Trump also fails to mention here is the cost. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told lawmakers that it costs about $12,500 to deport one immigrant from the United States. Multiply that by 11.3 million, and you get $141.3 billion.
Along with tripping the number of ICE agents and a nationwide E-Verify system, Trumps plan would be a giant middle finger to individual freedom and morality while costing the taxpayers over $160 billion.
Donald Trump is out with his first TV ad of the general election, and it’s predictably dishonest: an image of “Hillary Clinton’s America” being flooded with refugees and “illegal immigrants convicted of committing crimes” while “the system stays rigged against Americans.” The ad has drawn comparisons to the infamous anti-immigrant ad that California Gov. Pete Wilson ran in 1994 as he was trying to push through a ballot measure imposing draconian penalties on undocumented immigrants.
The CIS citation comes about 10 seconds into the ad, when the narrator warns that in Clinton’s America, “illegal immigrants convicted of committing crimes get to stay, collecting Social Security benefits, skipping the line.”
The ad’s citation appears to be referring to an April 14 CIS article on the implications of U.S. v. Texas, the Supreme Court case on President Obama’s DAPA and expanded DACA executive actions, which extended temporary deportation relief to some people brought to the country as children and some of their parents. This appears to be where the Trump campaign got the “collecting Social Security benefits” line, which it dishonestly links to its smear of “illegal immigrants convicted of committing crimes” (the DAPA and DACA programs bar people convicted of most crimes from eligibility). Those who receive eligibility to work under the programs do become eligible for Social Security, which they pay into like nearly every other American worker, under rules that existed long before President Obama took office.
It’s telling that the Trump campaign is getting its arguments about immigration policy from CIS. The group is one of a large network of anti-immigrant organizations started by John Tanton, an activist with white nationalist leanings and a troublingly extreme “population control” agenda including such things as supporting China’s brutal one-child policy.
CIS itself is more conservative in its rhetoric than its founder—allowing it to gain a foothold among members of Congress and others eager for research supporting an anti-immigrant agenda—but the agenda it promotes is one that demonizes immigrants.
As RightWingWatch.org noted in a recent report on CIS and its fellow Tanton-linked organizations, CIS has been a proponent of the idea “that instead of embracing a moderate position on immigration in order to win back Latinos who favored George W. Bush, the GOP should put its energy and resources into expanding its popularity and increasing turnout among white voters, in part by scapegoating people of color”—a strategy that Trump’s campaign is putting to the test:
CIS spokespeople regularly make this argument, along with another one that has long been popular among white nationalists: that Latino immigrants will never vote Republican because they are inherently liberal. During the debate over the “Gang of Eight” bill, CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian argued that the GOP shouldn’t bother trying to increase its share of the Latino vote because “generally speaking, Hispanic voters are Democrats, and so the idea of importing more of them as a solution to the Republican Party’s problems is kind of silly.” In another interview, Krikorian argued that immigration reform would “destroy the Republican Party” and ultimately “the republic.” The next year, he charged that Democrats were using immigration as “a way of importing voters” and to “create the conditions, such as increased poverty, increased lack of health insurance, that lead even non-immigrant voters to be more receptive to big government solutions.” At one point, Krikorian told Republicans that they should oppose immigration reform simply to deny President Obama a political victory.
Steven Camarota, the research director at CIS, has said that the current level of legal immigration “dooms” conservatives. Stephen Steinlight, a senior policy analyst at CIS, has said that immigration reform would lead to “the unmaking of America” by “destroying the Republican Party” and turning the U.S. into a “tyrannical and corrupt” one-party state. He explained that Latinos aren’t likely to vote Republican because they “don’t exemplify ‘strong family values,’” as illustrated by high rates of “illegitimacy.” More than a year before Donald Trump made national headlines by calling for a ban on all Muslim immigration, Steinlight said that he would like to ban Muslims from coming to the country because they “believe in things that are subversive to the Constitution.”
Steinlight summed up the argument in 2005, when he said that immigration threatens “the American people as a whole and the future of Western civilization.” More recently, Steinlight told a tea party group in 2014 that the “Gang of Eight” immigration reform bill amounted to “a plot against America ” because it would turn the U.S. into a Democrat-led “one-party state” where citizens would “lose our liberty” and “social cohesion.” Steinlight has happily fed into some of the more vitriolic tea party hatred of President Obama, saying that the president should not only be impeached for his handling of immigration, but that “ being hung, drawn and quartered is probably too good for him .” On another occasion, Steinlight said that he’d like to attack religious leaders who support immigration reform with “a baseball bat.”
An embattled Donald Trump urgently rallied his most visible supporters to defend his attacks on a federal judge’s Mexican ancestry during a conference call on Monday in which he ordered them to question the judge’s credibility and impugn reporters as racists.
“We will overcome,” Trump said, according to two supporters who were on the call and requested anonymity to share their notes with Bloomberg Politics. “And I’ve always won and I’m going to continue to win. And that’s the way it is.”
There was no mention of apologizing or backing away from his widely criticized remarks about U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is overseeing cases against the Trump University real-estate program.
When former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer interrupted the discussion to inform Trump that his own campaign had asked surrogates to stop talking about the lawsuit in an e-mail on Sunday, Trump repeatedly demanded to know who sent the memo, and immediately overruled his staff.
“Take that order and throw it the hell out,” Trump said.
Told the memo was sent by Erica Freeman, a staffer who circulates information to surrogates, Trump said he didn’t know her. He openly questioned how the campaign could defend itself if supporters weren’t allowed to talk.
“Are there any other stupid letters that were sent to you folks?” Trump said. “That’s one of the reasons I want to have this call, because you guys are getting sometimes stupid information from people that aren’t so smart.”
Brewer, who was on the call with prominent Republicans like Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, interjected again. “You all better get on the page,” she told him. Former Reagan aide Jeffrey Lord said Tuesday on CNN he was also on the call.
In response, Trump said that he aspired to hold regular calls with surrogates in order to coordinate the campaign’s message, a role usually reserved for lower ranking staffers than the nominee himself.
The e-mailed memo, sent by Freeman on Sunday, was cc’d to campaign manager Corey Lewandowski; Hope Hicks, Trump’s top communications staffer; and Rick Gates, a top aide to campaign chairman Paul Manafort. It informed surrogates that “they’re not authorized to discuss matters concerning the Trump Organization including corporate news such as the Trump University case.”
“The best possible response is ‘the case will be tried in the courtroom in front of a jury—not in the media,’” according to the e-mail, obtained by Bloomberg Politics.
Hicks declined to address the specifics of the conversation with surrogates.
“The call was scheduled in order for Mr. Trump to thank his supporters and congratulate everyone as the primaries officially come to an end,” Hicks told Bloomberg Politics. “Many topics were discussed and it was a productive call for all parties.”
Trump’s five weeks as the presumptive nominee have been marked by several missteps: A refusal to release his tax returns; confusion among donors over which super-PAC to give money to; audio of him using a pseudonym to act as his own publicist; and failing to donate to veterans groups as promised until pressed by the media.
But the most incendiary controversy has been his handling of Trump University.
Trump ignited the controversy when he defended his real-estate program by saying Curiel has an inherent conflict of interest because of his Mexican heritage, because the candidate has proposed building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border to curb illegal immigration. Curiel was born in Indiana, and Trump’s complaint has been criticized by Republican leaders, legal experts, and other commentators. Trump on Sunday broadened his argument by saying on CBS that it’s possible a Muslim judge could treat him unfairly too, because of his proposed ban on Muslim immigration.
“I should have won this thing years ago,” Trump said on the call about the case, adding that Curiel is a “member of La Raza.” Curiel is affiliated with La Raza Lawyers of California, a Latino bar association.
A clearly irritated Trump told his supporters to attack journalists who ask questions about the lawsuit and his comments about the judge.
“The people asking the questions—those are the racists,” Trump said. “I would go at ’em.”
Suggesting a broader campaign against the media, Trump said the campaign should also actively criticize television reporters. “I’d let them have it,” he said, referring to those who Trump portrayed as hypocrites.
Here is Trump surrogate Jeffery Lord trying to convince a CNN panel that Trump wasn’t being racist but shining a light on racism.
Here is Trump surrogate Jeffery Lord calling Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan a racist:
Here is Trump surrogate Carl Paladino trying to explain that Trump isn’t a racist, he just can’t get a fair trial because of race.
Here is Trump surrogate Healy Baumgardner incorrectly stating it wasn’t Trump who first called attention to the judges’ race.
Here is Trump surrogate Kayleigh McEnany making the same argument as Jeremy Lord, claiming that anyone who points out the bigotry of Trump’s statements is themselves guilty of bigotry… somehow.
Here is Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson making the argument that Donald Trump is correct because he is the Republican nominee.
Here is Republican New York Representative Lee Zeldin explaining how Donald Trump’s comment was racist, but he’s still voting for him.
When Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie appointed a Muslim judge in 2011 he caught flack for it from the conservatives because of their fear of other people. (As you can see it didn’t start with Trump.) To his credit, Christie stood by his judge and called their unsubstantiated fears “crap.”
Now watch 2016 Trump surrogate, Republican Governor Chris Christie, explain how even though he personally never heard Trump’s comments that we should all move on and to ask him only after the general election is over.
There’s persistent … and then there’s Jake Tapper.
The CNN anchor posed the following question to Donald Trump on Friday:
Let me ask you about comments you made about the judge in the Trump University case. You said that you thought it was a conflict of interest that he was the judge because he is of Mexican heritage, even though he is from Indiana. Hillary Clinton said that that is a racist attack on a federal judge.
Trump deflected to talk about his border wall and Clinton’s emails, among other things. So Tapper tried to steer the conversation back to whether Trump’s complaint about U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel was racist. Trump deflected again. Tapper tried again. And again. In all, Tapper made an astounding 23 follow-up attempts.
Tapper’s relentlessness ultimately paid off. He finally got a straight answer out of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
TAPPER: If you are saying he cannot do his job because of his race, is that not the definition of racism?
TRUMP: No, I don’t think so at all.
Tapper refused to drop the subject until Trump offered a yes-or-no answer. It was clearly an exhausting effort. But it showed that even Donald J. Trump can be worn down by a journalist who never gives up.
As House Speaker Paul Ryan explained, Donald Trump’s recent remarks saying a judge presiding over a lawsuit involving his business was biased solely because of his Mexican heritage is “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
